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The Real War in Peru
| Article
# : |
17051 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1990 |
2,447 Words |
| Author
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Gregory Grant
Gregory Grant is a policy analyst with the Center for
Strategic & International Studies, a Washington D.C. based
think tank. |
While all eyes in Washington on stemming the flow of cocaine from South America's Andean region, the Peruvian government is engaged in a violent and desperate internal war that so far shown few signs of abating. Guerrillas operating in the central Andean highlands as well as in the urban areas continue to stymie government counterinsurgency efforts. As the government founders, unable to develop an adequate response to the guerrillas, the death toll from the fighting continues to rise.
A Peruvian Senate Commission reported at the beginning of this year that 18,000 Peruvians have died since May 1980; the death rate reached 8 people per day in 1989, a 61 percent increase over the previous year. The high rate of killings so far this year indicates that figure will climb even higher. At least $16 billion worth of damage has been inflicted on Peru's brittle economy.
The extremist Maoist insurgency Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) remains the largest and most effective of Peru's five known insurgency movements. Sendero Luminoso was founded in 1970 by Abimael Guzman, a professor of philosophy and Maoist activist at the University of Huamanga in the city of Ayacucho. Guzman used his position as personnel director at the university to ensure that only those with a like ideologic bent worked there. Establishing a dedicated cadre at the university, Sendero soon began to expand its efforts into the surrounding countryside, recruiting heavily among the peasant Indian communities that dot the central Andean region. The hyper-dogmatic movement went underground in 1978 following an ideological clash with the mainstream communist party at Huamanga University, only to resurface in violent fashion on May 17, 1980, during the presidential election in a
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